Blast from the Past?

Yesterday I cleaned the oven. For the first time in ... decades.

No, really, apart from wiping down the shelves and door window, I have not cleaned an oven in over 30 years. We built our house in 1976, including a self-cleaning oven of the 'continuous' sort -- which meant you didn't have to use oven cleansers or the fume inducing self-clean cycle. Just keep the window clean. Then, we moved to Michigan, first to apartment with gas oven, then to apartment with brand new self-cleaning (which again, I never initiated, not being able to handle the fumes of super heated oven coating).

So having to get down on my knees and try to remember even how to go about reaching all the parts was a challenge. Found a nice, non-smelly oven cleaner (Easy Off low odor) that really does the job! And on a cold oven, so not even any hot oven fumes. Looks pretty good for a 40 year old piece of equipment, if I do say so myself...
Of course, I'm 'toast' today. This morning was so stiff I could barely move, and complaining and whiny with pain and sheer exhaustion. Couldn't figure it out. Then remembered all that time clambering into the innards, on my hands and knees, no less!

Well, no wonder I'm stiff and cranky, LOL. But maybe this will help loosen me up? Hope so, since we are continuing to live here, and I will probably need to clean it in the future..... Sigh.

Every day I'm finding new reasons to justify hiring housekeepers. Never could understand the need when I was younger....

Meanwhile, it is Spring! See? Enid's Jack-in-the-Pulpit spikes coming up:
And those little green leaves? Those are wild geranium, which I rescued from muddy tracter track and stuck in the basket with the Jacks. Next to bloom after the Spring Beauties and rue anemone, it will keep blooming for a couple months -- sometimes all the way into Fall in the garden. They last the longest of the spring wildflowers.

Are we happy Winter is behind us??*

*Obviously a rhetorical question.